Designer

The designer develops the tone and visual direction for the content on a responsive website. Their role is essential in capturing the audience’s attention while allowing the content to drive the purpose of the site. They collaborate with the developer in wireframing and prototyping, and with the communicator in designing content flow. Using the “mobile first” methodology, designers create a web experience that is both functional and visually appealing at all screen sizes.

The speakers, Laura Root and Xavier Porter, graphic designers with Texas A&M Information Technology, provide insights on how the design process fits into the new responsive website paradigm. Key takeaways include how to integrate RWD into your team process, the importance of wireframes, and helpful tools and resources for designers and developers.

Join the Texas A&M Mobile Team for an on-campus presentation, “Best of both worlds: How to think like a designer, work like a developer.” Gain insights from two designers with different backgrounds and approaches who embraced mobile-first design. Learn how the design process fits into the new responsive website paradigm.

The mobile era is here to stay and the role of the designer in responsive web design workflow is even more important. As a designer, our role is to aid in the direction of the content, provide the vision for the design and present the content in the most effective manner at each potential screen size using a responsive site.

For a (frequently hilarious) gallery of mobile fail, the appropriately-named WTF Mobile Web site is a good way to waste an hour (and maybe learn from someone else’s mistakes at the same time). Mostly it’s a simple blog of screenshots from websites or apps that just don’t handle mobile devices very well. Check it out.

However, buried in the “About” page for this little blog is a very perceptive summary of the challenges that mobile devices create for web designers:

The problem isn’t any one person. The problem is that we’ve all been doing this thing called Making a Website for a long time in a particular way. And now everything is changing. Sure some developers are resistant to learning new things, but most developers are interested, excited and willing. But this isn’t a problem that you can fix by just switching out which bit of code to use. It’s bigger than that. Content strategy, design, business all have to change. The fundamental way in which people work together to plan and coordinate the creation of a website has to change. It’s not easy to go into work one day and say to a big team, “Hey, uh, we need to restructure our design process and completely change what we are doing with our mobile web strategy. Uh, why? Yeah, just because.”

If it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work. Most of our work averages 10 to 20 percent mobile traffic. But for our elections app, 50 percent of users visited our Big Board on their phone. (And it wasn’t even responsive!) Moral of the stats: A good mobile experience is absolutely necessary.